Sure, Darwin was clever, but…

IT WAS only on reaching the third-from-last paragraph of this book that I realised why historian Paul Johnson had written it. Leading up to this revelation is what amounts to a long list of gripes about Charles Darwin.

We hear at length about how lucky he was and how various concepts of evolution were already in the intellectual air, or even well accepted. Darwin is scolded for not having come up with the Mendelian principles of genetics himself and criticised for emphasising the suffering and violence inherent in the natural world. Amazingly, his use of the word …